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Conan I (development)
The development of the first Conan film. Thomas & Summer Roy Thomas, writer of Conan for Marvel comics, would be most intimately involved with Conan The Destroyer, but was instrumental in the beginnings of Conan's cinematic Odyssey. When producer Ed Pressman became interested in Conan as a vehicle for Schwarzenegger, then best known as the star of Pumping Iron, Thomas' knowledge of Howard's stories made him first choice as a collaborator for co-writer Ed Summer. "Roy's adaptations were always good. and sometimes great," enthuses Howard scholar Rusty Burke. "He was the best." Thomas and Summer started work in 1976. "Summer had more film experience than me, but of course I knew Conan." Thomas tells Empire, "so we pooled our resources, and worked out a treatment. It probably wouldn't have been quite as dark as some of Howard's stories, but we were trying to capture his spirit and get even closer than we could in the comics. Of course, we barely even got started." Their collaboration didn't get as far as a full screenplay, but a detailed story was developed, "taking bits and pieces from various Conan stories". Those bits and pieces included a significant portion from Howard's 1934 tale. Rogues In The House, in which Conan is hired by a dodgy priest to kill an evil wizard, who turns out to have been usurped by a redrobed mad ape called Thak. Thomas had adapted the story once before, for issue 1 1 of the Marvel run, and particularly recalls wanting to reuse Howard's scene in which Conan drops a treacherous prostitute into a cesspit, having murdered her latest trick. This wasn't to be. With Arnie on board and a pre-publicity campaign underway, Paramount agreed to finance the film, but only if the package came with a name writer. Thomas and Summer were in favour of Oliver Stone, who had just won an Oscar for Midnight Express. Stone Stone's screenplay was by turns gloriously epic and barking mad. He retains joint writing credit with John Milius on the finished film, but very few of his ideas remain. "Milius said my script was a 'feverish dream under acid'." said Stone of his fourhour opus, which included an intermission and was planned as the first of 12 films, set in the future, with vast armies of mutants and cloned beast-men. "But that's exactly what it should have been! It's what arises from the work of Howard - he was a very strange man. The producers sold it short." At its heart. Stone's script does come from Howard, principally extrapolating from A Witch Shall Be Born ( 1934)3, in which a queen's evil twin usurps her kingdom, and Conan leads an army of desert thieves in rebellion against her. Stone includes Conan 's crucifixion on the Tree Of Woe (and the unforgettable moment when he kills a vulture with his teeth) from this story, and the sequence survives in the Milius film. There are bits of 1933's Black Colossus4, too (evil wizard plots world domination), plus the character Valeria essayed in Milius' film by Sandahl Bergman - from 1936's Red Nails. But Stone's vision was too vast to be feasible. As Stone explained, "It was a $40 million movie (a vast budget for 1982. comparable to David Ly neh s Dune) dealing with the takeover of the planet. The mutant armies were rising and Conan was the lonely pagan hero. I was very influenced at the time by Catholic imagery: Bosch, William Blake's poetry... I would have filmed in a luxuriant forest in Germany, and I would have shown creatures eating human flesh. This is what the film should have been. But I could never have carried out that vision." Category:Conan